Real time web application

I really need your help with this. We are planning on developing a real-time web application. We look at different libraries and concepts and a little confused. What we need is: clients connect to websites and send data(usually an integer + client machine name) whenever they want (usually 1-5 seconds). Also, the same clients must receive data(the data receiv开发者_开发技巧ed from other clients) from the server in a real-time mode. (maximum 0.5 seconds). Also, this data must be stored in the database.

We were thinking about using different technologies, but cannot decide which one to use. We need this web application to be supported on Iphones and Android Phones (maybe blackberry). and, of course desktop browsers.

Pooling seems not a very good Idea in this situation, due to highloads.

Html 5 web sockets kinda new, and probably not supported by all browsers.

Have anyone used nodejs ? or twisted matrix: http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/? or orbited(cannot post more than one link)? or tornado? Or XMPP(Jabber. I did not find good examples.)? or something else?

What technology is the best to use in this type of project? Also, we would probably prefer the technology that has some community support and free to use.

Thanks a lot!

There is a lot of things to consider here. I would say that HTML 5 is not an option, simply due to support across platform.

Running with NodeJS is most likely possible, but the communication methods are really complicated. Pushing data to a page isn't really something that HTML/web apps are designed to do....

To get a valid answer you are going to need to get someone to come in and sit with you to really iron out details and implementation.

When you say that clients "connect to a website", do you really need it to be a website? It sounds like all the client is sending is a number and for that you don't need a website. Just pick the language of your choice, open up a socket, and go from there.

Are you streaming data to be visualized? You might want to take a look at graphite (and/or "pyped" which is part of graphite).

What kind of data? What is the purpose?

For real-time you're not going to get a web site unless you use some type of RIA but even then, it isn't going to be enough. Services aren't going to be good enough either. You're going to end up doing some type of polling which will only ever be psuedo-real-time unless you do duplex mode which wont be supported on most of the platforms you want to support.

sockets are the way to go but that requires a client for each platform you want to handle. Maybe you should rethink your requirements.